ABSTRACT
If global democracy were a patient, it was already ailing when the United Nations declared a global health emergency in January 2020. Democracy assessment organisations had been registering a 15-year trend of declines in the quality and persistence of liberal democracy worldwide, although counter-trends of democratic innovation and reinvention were also gathering momentum. This chapter reflects on the future of global democracy and capture key trends and developments in institutional and geo-political responses through three questions: has COVID-19 helped to rehabilitate liberal democracy’s reputation as a political system by revealing effectiveness in crisis? Has the pandemic crystallised a dramatic redrawing of the democratic atlas? Does the hardening of global tensions between China and competitor states during the crisis risk an unhelpful reframing of global democracy as merely an ‘anti-China club’? The driving argument is that while negative trends are dominant, positive trends and developments offer many reasons for hope.
